Praise for the Second Edition

Enter Bart Madden’s wonderfully pithy, cogent, thoughtful, and revolutionary book. His thesis is narrowly simple, but pregnant with revolutionary overtones: Technology is changing how we practice medicine, disrupting and toppling traditional monopolies while bringing doctor and patient closer together in a nexus of decentralized decision making. The book is divided into six chapters. The first two introduce us to the invisible graveyard and to systems thinking (which, by the way, is intrinsically pluralist), allowing us to see the big picture while pinpointing problems and bottlenecks. Madden has done his homework, peppering his text with numerous quotes from doctors, professors, and former and current FDA officials, letting the actors speak for themselves.

Free To Choose Medicine is full of disturbing data about the unintended consequences of our nation’s quest for safe drugs seemingly without regard to cost. Bart Madden explains how we have lost sight of the goals of encouraging innovation, speed to market, and quick access for suffering patients, and he lays out a realistic plan for getting back on track.

— Hon. Jim DeMint
U.S. Senator – South Carolina

A provocative proposal that offers a libertarian solution for reform of the nation’s dysfunctional drug regulation.

— Henry I. Miller, M.D.
Former Director
FDA’s Office of Biotechnology

Bart Madden shines a bright light on the all-too-invisible damage caused by the FDA’s self-protective, dysfunctional, and ultimately lethal drug approval process. He explains how the FDA bureaucracy protects itself while allowing millions of people to suffer and die who could be helped by faster access to the newest medicines. The FDA uses approval processes appropriate to an era of adding machines and not supercomputers. Madden offers a 21st century information-age solution in Free To Choose Medicinethat would give consumers control over health decisions, allow faster access to life-saving and life-enhancing drugs, and ultimately reduce the cost of new medicines. This concise book explains how to keep the FDA monopoly from stifling innovation and crippling the life sciences industry. Madden offers the right cure for the ailing FDA.

— Grace-Marie Turner
President
Galen Institute

As [President Barack Obama] promotes his plan to increase the role of government in our healthcare, this timely and topical book brings some very important new ideas to the debate. By allowing individuals to contract with drug developers so they can gain access to innovative drugs that have completed safety trials, Americans will have the opportunity to live longer and healthier lives. The cost of new drugs will decline and research and development into new treatments will increase. It is a must-read for all legislators and the general public.

— Sally C. Pipes
President
Pacific Research Institute

Madden’s market-based solution appeals to economists like me who are keenly aware of the critical importance of institutional design for a system to promote decentralized responses close to the local knowledge that is available to physicians and their patients, but not to the FDA. This book is fundamentally bipartisan and should be read in that spirit.